Tuesday, January 4, 2011

NATO politics driving Afghan war


By Gareth Porter
Asia Times

"Member countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization say they are in Afghanistan because operations there against the Taliban-led insurgency are vital to their security. But highly placed sources insist that the real motive behind NATO's Afghan war is a desperate bid to keep a moribund military alliance alive.....

But Canadian General Rick Hillier, who commanded NATO forces in Afghanistan from February to August 2004 and was later chief of staff of the Canadian Armed Forces from 2005 to 2008, wrote in his memoir A Soldier First, published in 2009, that NATO was an unmitigated disaster in Afghanistan.

He recalled that when it formally accepted responsibility for Afghanistan in 2003, NATO had "no strategy, no clear articulation of what it wanted to achieve" and that its performance was "abysmal".

Hillier said the situation "remains unchanged" after several years of NATO responsibility for Afghanistan. NATO had "started down a road that destroyed much of its credibility and in the end eroded support for the mission in every nation in the alliance," Hillier wrote.

"Afghanistan has revealed," wrote Hillier, "that NATO has reached the stage where it is a corpse decomposing""

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